Objects on Stage

Objects on Stage: Works by Tom Gregg

Tom Gregg’s body of work is a visual homage to objects. With vivid coloration and obsessive precision, his object-centric paintings weave together dreams, reality, and imagination. Gregg’s intensely profound yet remarkably unpretentious paintings are at once rooted in established tradition and on the cutting edge of contemporaneity.

            Gregg’s sleeping children series is defined by contradiction and ambiguity. The large-scale oil paintings feature various assorted objects, all represented with meticulous accuracy. Among them are a teddy bear, a pair of scissors, a high-heeled pump, and an alarm clock, all placed delicately on a foregrounded shelf. Behind the shelves, cartoonish outlines of sleeping children loom against backgrounds of glowing violets and brilliant teals. Gregg imagines the sharper-than-life objects in the foreground to be the innocent, ephemeral images that weave through children’s dreams. To him, the paintings are peaceful and innocuous explorations of a child’s mysterious and delicate subconscious.

Left: Boy and Scissors, oil on panel, 47 x 39 in. Right: Girl and Branch, oil on panel, 47 x 39 in.

            And yet, the paintings convey an unmistakably troubling quality. Dreams and reality seem to inverse on the canvas. The over-simplified children are too unstable, too minimalistic to represent reality; the painstakingly realistic objects before them are too life-like to represent a dream. The cartoonish lines of the children’s bodies combine with their peaceful, content expressions to form an ominously vulnerable quality. Fast asleep, the children are unsettlingly susceptible to danger, either dreamed or realized. In Gregg’s sleeping children paintings, dreams flirt casually with nightmares.

            Two still life paintings, Pink Grenade and Little Duck, represent the artist’s career-long meditation on objects. Similar to the foreground of the sleeping children paintings, Gregg’s still life pictures represent scrupulously true-to-life objects on a simple shelf. Here, though, the shelves become stages, elevating and honoring the items they exhibit. Resting on their stages, the objects are quietly powerful and independent. Humans are at once absent and present in these works – though we do not see them, we feel their connections to the objects with which they interact.

Left: Little Duck, oil on panel, 12.5 x 10 in. Right: Pink Grenade, oil on panel, 22.5 x 17. 5 in.

            In theory, the subjects of Pink Grenade and Little Duck are unrelated, even opposite; grenades inflict pain and destruction whereas toy ducks encourage playfulness and imagination. Yet the two paintings are so unwaveringly objective that the grenade appears no more or less ominous than the duck. The stage-like shelf and simple background of the still lifes remove the objects from their respective contexts. In Gregg’s painted world, objects are constant and unassuming. Only the subconscious assumptions of viewers assign meaning to Gregg’s objects; only these assumptions differentiate grenades from toy ducks.

            Gregg’s objects are steady and understandable; his figures are abstracted, unstable, and ambiguous. He presents objects simply, accurately, and without bias, leaving it to the viewer to interpret and contextualize their significance. Quietly and profoundly, Tom Gregg’s object paintings exist outside of the chaotic world around them.

Reminiscing on Tangibility

Reminiscing on Tangibility: Photo Series of Andy Gershon

Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago II, chromeogenic print 72x86 inches

Between 1989 and 1992, contemporary photographer Thomas Struth produced a series of photographs taken from inside some of the most iconic and magnificent museums in the world. The photos feature great works of Western art history in the galleries of the Louvre, the Pantheon, the Art Institute of Chicago, and others. The true focus of Struth’s works, though, was on the viewers perusing the gallery. Unselfconsciously, the subjects gaze at the works of art, at the museum itself, and at each other. Museum Photographs invited reflection on the act of viewership in the museum and complicated the relationship between object and subject.

Twenty years later, Andy Gershon reintroduces this polemic within the context of the digital landscape of the 21st century. Like Struth’s Museum Photographs, Gershon’s series Photourist captures unknowing subjects as they gaze at art and tourist attractions. Gershon’s photographs, however, add a third participant to the dialogue between viewer and object: the focal point of the works is on cell phone screens, clutched in the hands of tourists and museumgoers as they snap photographs of the great works of art and culture before them.

Andy Gershon, MOMA (Matisse), chromeogenic print, 40x40 inches

Perspective is at play in the images of Photourist. Gershon manipulates angles in such a way that forces viewers to see the tourist attractions only through the phone screen in the foreground. In the background, the cultural monuments are only partially visible. Certainly, Gershon’s method of inserting a cell phone screen as an obstacle between viewer and artwork calls into question the use – and overuse – of technology in place of candid engagement with the exterior world. The literal screen in Photourist thus takes on a symbolic dimension, as it functions to screen or obfuscate the observer’s view of represented artworks and monuments.  

Andy Gershon, Banksy, chromeogenic print, 40x40 inches

Along with Photourist, two works from Gershon’s archival series titled Concert Tickets are currently available at Weinberger Fine Art. To create Concert Tickets, the artist preserved tickets from concerts he attended between 1978 and 1995, and now presents them as large-scale prints on cotton rag paper. The resulting effect is remarkably three-dimensional, as if the printed images adopt the texture of the aged, slightly ragged tickets. Concert Tickets seamlessly transports viewers to the gyrating audience of a Prince concert, to the grimy backstage of a The Clash show, to the overheated tour van of Sonic Youth.

Andy Gershon, Concert Ticket (Bob Dylan 1980), archival print on paper, 32x42 inches

At first glace, Photourist and Concert Tickets share few visual or symbolic similarities. Yet, in both series, Gershon leaves viewers with a lingering sense of nostalgia – nostalgia for overcrowded rock concerts that reek of beer and cigarette smoke, nostalgia for a time when art was consumed with eyes and not with iPhones. Gershon’s work wistfully calls on the Internet-crazed world to experience art and music candidly and tangibly – to observe without the barrier of a screen, and to collect physical memories rather than digital ones.

Cornucopia

Cornucopia: Exploring Cultural Hybridity in the Work of Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez

With an explosion of flora, Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez’s exhibition at Weinberger Fine Art’s Drawing Room explores colonialism, identity, and cultural hybridity.

Following the artist’s immigration from Colombia, Friedemann-Sánchez began creating art that deals with the tension of displacement. Drawing and painting intricate flowers and lace, she addresses Spanish colonialism, bilingualism, and patriarchal oppression. Her work is strikingly laborious, chillingly ominous, and indulgently lush.

In a word, Cornucopia No. 3 is dazzling. The painted collage draws inspiration from Mopa Mopa, a centuries-old Colombian process of stretching and tinting tree resin. Against a deep black background, vibrant flowers, plants, and birds blossom out from a patterned vase. Scattered around the edges of the painting, tiny men point guns into the bouquet. The viewer is struck instantly with the impression that the armed men are moving in on the larger than life botanical arrangement. Though it seems initially that such small figures could not possibly overtake such a massive and stunning array of flora and fauna, we slowly become aware that they inevitably will. In Cornucopia No. 3 Friedmann-Sánchez forces the viewer to engage with the harsh realities of colonialist oppression – with the cruel certainty that men with guns can and will eradicate nature, beauty, and deeply rooted cultural tradition.

Cornucopia 3, India ink on Tyvek, 80 x 160 in.

Against similar black backgrounds, Castiza and Chola feature somewhat amorphous figures adorned with indigenous masks and decorative Spanish combs called peinetas. Friedemann-Sánchez has commented that the figures in these works are inspired by images taken by TSA machines in US airports. Her appropriation of TSA images serves as a metaphor for modern mechanisms of screening and categorization. In Friedemann-Sànchez’s oeuvre, Castiza and Chola recall caste paintings created by colonialists in Latin America to illustrate racial stratification. 

Castiza, India ink on Tyvek, Spanish comb, indigenous mask, 45 x 67.5 in.

The suspended figures seem to float in their frames, and their limbs sprawl in angular formations. Bright pink flowers cover their faces and bodies, creating splashes of vibrancy that juxtapose the limp bodies. Perhaps these flowers, lain across lifeless figures like a bouquets in an open casket, serve as a memorialization of those divided and beleaguered by colonialist rule. In creating these ghostly figures, Friedemann-Sánchez again pushes the viewer to confront the perils of colonialism.

Chola, India ink on Tyvek, Spanish comb, indigenous mask, 45 x 67.5 in.

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez’s work is intentionally and blatantly reactionary. Clearly inspired by the grief of her own displacement, the artist haunts viewers with the memory of indigenous cultures now suppressed and fragmented and due to colonial rule.

Water and magic

Water and Magic: In the Gallery with Margaret Evangeline

Margaret Evangeline’s four paintings currently on display at Weinberger Fine Art are a bittersweet testament to guilt, beauty, movement, and nature. With heavy, fluid brushstrokes and thick paint splatters, Evangeline tells the story of floods, magic, and the imperfection of the human experience. 

The Louisiana-born artist uses the motif of water throughout much of her oeuvre, depicted with running, wavy lines and a tranquil palette of blues and subdued greys. Water is evident in Life Came Breaking in as Usual, a painting of greys and muted violets with rolling white waves that meander across the foreground. Evangeline’s composition is melodic and serene, yet the title of the picture implies an unwelcome intrusion, signaling perhaps a flood or even hurricane. The title also references the commonplace nature of life’s disruptions, as if the strife and tragedies that plague humanity are a dependable and relentless constant. At a remarkable 6 ft. by 9 ft., the work is a demanding presence in the gallery. 

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Life came breaking in as usual, oil on canvas, 72x108 inches

Evangeline also incorporates her theme of moving water into the somewhat more abstracted composition of Protagonist 11. Here, white waves pulse against an off-white background, and are met by streaks of white, grey, and blue at the bottom and top left of the painting. The streaks, depicted with abrupt brushstrokes that leave drips of paint protruding from the surface, stand in startling contrast to the signature rolling nature of Evangeline’s water scenes. Protagonist 11 is characterized by subtle contradictions – fluidity and rigidity, gloom and tranquility, the profound ability for water to give life and end it. 

Protagonist 11, oil on canvas, 60x60 inches

Diverging from the motif of water, Moon Camellias recalls Evangeline’s New Orleans roots. Four camellia flowers of various sizes garnish the metallic gold background. Though the reference to Louisiana flora is evident, the flowers seem to emulate mandalas as well, rendering the painting somewhat spiritual. Yet in stark contrast to the themes of nature, spirits, and nostalgia for the Deep South, the unfolding camellias also mimic the form of gunshot punctures in metal. Evangeline thus forms a parallel to her sensational gunshot art in which she shoots bullets into aluminum panels. Perhaps the metallic background of the painting evokes these panels, or perhaps it suggests the bold palette of a classic mandala. Evangeline’s flowers are both a gaping wound and an expression of life, an antinomy that emerges as a motif throughout her oeuvre. 

Moon Camellias, oil on canvas, 60x60 inches

Halo Series 6 further explores the spirituality hinted at in Moon Camellias. Here, Evangeline’s vivid palette of electric violet and fiery orange reflects magic and mysticism rather than the subdued colors of nature, earth, and water. The artist uses iridescent crystalina glitter to adorn bold streaks of paint, giving the work a dynamic and vibrant shimmer. Of her use of glitter, Evangeline explains, “It seemed to go with the idea of physics and what’s inside of black holes, and magnetism, and waves… It’s like magic, it’s highly spiritual.” Halo Series 6, as with the artist’s other Halo paintings, is an ode to the mysteries of space, magic, and physics. 

Halo Series 6, oil on canvas, 72x72 inches

  Margaret Evangeline’s body of work is rich with melancholy, spiritualism, and gentle reminders of the contradictions embedded into the way in which humans and nature interact. The four paintings on display at Weinberger Fine Art – Life Came Breaking in as Usual, Protagonist 11, Moon Camellias, and Halo Series 6 – are humbling expressions of the incredible forces of water, magic, auras, and the undiscovered splendors of the universe.